Friday, July 11, 2003

On design

... permeable cells and hard cells. Hard cells are what you get when you don't code in flow and difference and time and openness.

these hard cells are no way to live a life, and blogging patterns sometimes look a lot like flies in a (moving) jar

It's not clear that we want to mimic the purposeful, unreflective, uninclusive (always connected to mirrors of our selves and our worldview), stressful, and ultimately slightly paranoid mode of being encoded into our emergency services. Coding a different social reality requires acknowledging this trend towards the reactive, self referential, the self-similar and insular.

Our goal during the customer interviews and testing was to validate a task matrix that would be used inform the navigation and architecture of a redesigned software application.

Our methodology for testing included performing a Card Sort exercise and an Affinity Diagram exercise with each participant.

Instructive frameworks ... [gather] expert knowledge about how items should be organized and creating a model based on that knowledge, multiple users are provided a consistent resource that serves as a strong and recognizable foundation as they navigate through a space.

Natural frameworks ... [allow] us to determine the relative strength of perceived relationships between the groupings and enables us to consider these perceptions when formulating a new task matrix that more closely matches how people are actually thinking and working.